Case Study No. 11

23 October 2016

Background

Roca is one of the great names in the sanitary items sector, with equipment and solutions for bathrooms and it is present in Europe, Asia, America and Africa. It has won various distinctions in terms of marketing and design, among other prizes. With a presence in more than 175 countries and 76 production units employing more than 20.000 workers around the world, our client’s requirement is constant top quality, a quality that should reflect the almost 100 years of the brand’s growth. Present in Portugal since the 1970’s, the client regularly depends on the quality of the translations, presentations and manuals of their products in order to communicate assertively and clearly with its clients. The translation of brochures, online content, manuals and newsletters into Portuguese are therefore recurrent projects.

Challenge

One of the group’s international units, which the client is part of, was updating its website and needed the translation of all the content into different languages. Through its Portuguese subsidiary, SMARTIDIOM received the request for the translation of all content (in English, in the original version) into Portuguese, with the insertion of the text in the respective fields of a spreadsheet. This layout would allow the team responsible for the provision of the online content, to accurately identify the correspondences between original text and final text. The final result was obtained with a simple process and a reduced margin of error. After the quotation phase, the decision on awarding the tender was delayed by the international unit. When the award was announced, the initially defined deadlines, according to the dates given in the quotation were no longer feasible using a single native translator because the job was too big. Because of this, a barrier was created between the quality required and the production capacity of a native translator, to provide the work with the desired consistency. Each of the website’s headers or product name, would have to be translated maintaining its consistency, which could be affected if the contents were processed by different professionals, with the goal of speeding up production and meeting the new required deadline.

Solution

To respond to the specifics of the project (maintaining maximum quality and consistency according to the requested timeline), the initial execution plan had to be adapted to the new reality. A team of several native translators was put together and only one single native reviewer, responsible for the standardization of the text. This option made it possible to accelerate the translation process, without ever neglecting the consistency as an essential key point. To overcome this obstacle, the whole team of translators shared and updated a translation memory in real-time, as well as a glossary, which allowed everyone to have immediate access to what each one was translating. This way, the translators benefited from sharing each one’s knowledge and managed to standardise their work. Naturally, and even with the sharing of a memory, there are always small portions of text that differ. However, thanks to the work carried out previously, the reviewer had the opportunity to work with a timeplan that was long enough to resolve all the inconsistencies that remained.

Results

Through this flexibility, the project reached the dedicated project manager with a high level of quality in terms of editing and terminology, allowing the PM to prepare the documentation for delivery, as the client had originally requested, having inserted the translations in their respective fields so that the design team could easily identify the equivalence of each topic or paragraph. This meant it was possible to provide the customer with a professional, careful translation, as intended, without jeopardising the time limits it was subject to or the translation’s quality.

“SMARTIDIOM gives us what we need and value in translation services: Accuracy (the quality and attention of the translated texts largely corresponds to Roca’s requirements), Speed (SMARTIDIOM understands the needs and the tight deadlines and complies flawlessly and without neglecting the quality of the service), Security (that we feel since there were several revisions of the texts by more than one team member) and Flexibility (because they are always open and cooperative with regard to our requests). They are a partner who we will continue to count on in the future.”

Sónia Felgueiras, Marketing and Product/Sales&Marketing

Roca

About SMARTIDIOM

Founded in 2012, SMARTIDIOM offers innovative multilingual services, helping global organisations and brands to grow and achieve international success. Our solutions include technical translation, technical writing, website and software localisation, software and hardware testing, copywriting, transcreation (creative translation for marketing and advertising), subtitling, interpreting, narration and audio/video transcription. Actively present in 25 countries, SMARTIDIOM partners with clients from a wide variety of industries, including Marketing and Advertising, IT and Software, Telecommunications, Construction, Energy and the Environment.